Cernunnos
by Nookienostradamus
Summary: Slightly AU fic. Will is Bedelia DuMaurier's patient, not Hannibal's. He is still a consultant with the BAU. There was no Garrett Jacob Hobbs, but some of the murders in the show will feature. Hannibal's story arc is an allegory of the Celtic/Gaulish horned god Cernunnos. The mythology will be explained.
1. Harvest

A season to all things, and to all things a season.

This is an ancient, pre-Biblical aphorism-Judeo-Christian appropriation and loathsome popular music notwithstanding. It began as a kind of helpless explanation offered in a time when all men's backs were bent by circumstance, and has shown a jagged tenacity as civilizations swell and wane.

To Dr. Hannibal Lecter, now forty-eight years of age, if the concept of luck were anything but a semantic abstraction, he might consider himself fortunate to exist at a point in which it is possible to be a man over whom the seasons hold no sway. On whom even time has a halfhearted grip.

Such exemption has a cost, and it requires constant vigilance. Born to privilege, but remade by what Hannibal considers his true origin-amid shadow and threat in the concrete hell of his home country-vigilance is his birthright. He also accepts with calm and dignity that his way is laid over the still-bent backs of those who remain bound to season. They turn their faces upward in vain; their groans accompany his footfalls. A man must take one path or the other, but his is clear enough to have been almost foreordained.

Hannibal knows hubris as an idea, a word, but cannot equate it with his own trajectory, because he does not see himself as moving. He watches equinox and solstice not strung along a thread but all condensed to a point, indistinguishable. He forgets to judge the passing of years as each subjugated body, while blessed with its own singular wound pattern, relents and falls in the same manner before his feet.

In the end, it is Will Graham who proves to be both interruption to the cycle, and the key to its permanence.

The seed is planted in autumn that year, in defiance of nature, but Hannibal's undertakings bear wild, red fruit even as the rest of the world withers. They are refulgent both with poison and with promise.

He is receiving a visit from a colleague, Dr. Bedelia DuMaurier, when he first hears of William Graham. Not his full name, not yet, but the outline of the man begins to form in his mind. A sketch. The idea is pleasing in and of itself, but also as a shape that begs to be filled, with shadow and intimation-strokes so deft and gradual the image appears as if carved from the inside outward. Hannibal was a surgeon after all, and sometimes cannot help but see collections of organs given incidental shape by skin and features, but still crying to be excised and put to purposeful and elegant use.

"I'd like to solicit a professional opinion on a patient, Hannibal," Bedelia says.

It is Hannibal's observation that Bedelia has begun, unconsciously, to second-guess her own therapeutic techniques. Meetings such as this, under the pretense of technical consultation, have occurred more frequently since she was attacked by a patient in her office several months ago. She had fought back, and was not badly wounded, but she had called Hannibal even before emergency services, presumably so she could place a familiar face with the hands that tended her wounds. The patient was apprehended the same day, and briefly institutionalized, but then was released into the custody of family. Far too soon, in Hannibal's opinion.

"An unexpected request," he says nonetheless, balancing the rim of a wine glass just below the ridge of his lower lip. "Are you seeking to refer someone?"

"No," says Bedelia, "I'm seeking an analysis. An informal one."

"Do you wish me to read the case files?"

"At this point I'd prefer to have you respond to my impressions," she says.

"Ah. A singular case, then?"

"In a way. Perhaps by way of the patient himself rather than the condition or symptoms."

"And what is the condition?" Hannibal asks. He sips from the glass as Bedelia pauses, using her own enjoyment of the wine to justify hesitation. Hannibal lets it pass unremarked upon. The Château Yquem swirls in his mouth and slides down his throat. He can taste it with his pulse, regular and even. The fluids inside him hide their conveyance, both of pleasure and necessity, from all outside notice.

"He is an empath," Bedelia says, "to the extent that his empathy has become disordered. The patient's interactions with others entail not only emotional force, but transference."

"He personalizes."

"Yes."

"Rare," Hannibal says, "but not unprecedented." His impulsion is gentle, but despite her damage Bedelia's perception is far too acute to miss it.

She smiles. "He works as a criminal profiler. With the FBI."

"I see."

Bedelia sees that he does, and Hannibal knows she is satisfied. The outline begins to fill, minute curls of detail bleeding into it in amounts small enough to tantalize but not to satisfy. A criminal profiler, with unusual empathy. Even absent an underlying illness, in his head will already be a stew boiling over with horrors.

The potentiality is lovely.

Bedelia's expression when she looks at Hannibal suggests she knows he is enraptured. The two of them are far too much alike. Perhaps dangerously so, even with Bedelia in her compromised state. They spin in a tight tracery of mutual recognition. The fate of any objects in binary orbit, whether imminent or protracted, is collision.

"But you did not come here to discuss your patient's empathy, or his profession," Hannibal says.

"No," she says. "I came to discuss his dreams."

"A very Freudian approach" Hannibal says. "Could it be you who is regressing?" He knows that she knows he is teasing. At the edges of their professional lives, where protocol is thinnest, they have entertained a sort of flirtation. Purely verbal, of course. Both are far too restrained-Bedelia by nature, Hannibal by painstaking construction-even to extend the interplay to gestures or glances. Their movements around one another belie their course utterly; they are economical, sedate.

When they met, Hannibal respected and mirrored Bedelia's disdain for frivolity. She was a lovely blankness, an artist's model to which Hannibal could apply his strata of affected emotionality.

Without knowing exactly what it entails, Bedelia appreciates the homage he pays to her with his pointed meticulousness. But he is entirely his own creation. He does not merely imitate, but transcends the original. Both more and less than human, he is a shape that contains a shape, and assumes yet another.

"My patient has the same dream every night," Bedelia says. "Or, actually, I should say a series of escalating dreams."

"Escalating?"

"That's the way he describes it. A few months ago, he told me of an occasional recurring dream in which he is looking at a tree on a hill at twilight. A bare tree, in winter, even though there is no snow on the ground. In the dream, he hears a noise behind him, and he turns to look, but nothing is there. It's when he looks back at the hill that the tree has become a stag. And that he is suddenly unsettled, because it was only him watching the tree, but the stag is capable of watching in return."

"And the escalation?"

Bedelia sips at the very lip of her glass, then sets it aside.

Hannibal watches the droplet swell and hang on the edge of the glass, not quite heavy enough to fall.

"He now dreams of walking," Bedelia says. "Just walking down an unending road in the dark. This dream is much more frequent. Nearly every night. At first he was alone, but he began to hear something walking behind him. Each night it seems to come closer. Mr. Graham-my patient-tells me he knows that it is the stag following him."

Hannibal does not even nod. It would be improper in context, because he knows the seemingly unintentional mention of the patient's name is a strike in their bout of verbal coquetry.

"He says it's come close enough that he can feel its breath on his shoulder," she continues. "The culmination, what made him so agitated, was the fact that the night before our last session, he became certain that if he turned to look at the animal, he would find it had a human face. The prospect terrifies him."

"Except for the frequency, perhaps, it seems like a common enough anxiety dream," says Hannibal, who cannot in all his years remember having dreamt at all. "An arresting idea certainly, but not so remarkable that it warrants undue consideration." _Parry, riposte. _

Bedelia gives him a hard look.

"But, of course, you don't think it's undue, or else you would not have come to me," Hannibal says, after an indulgent pause. "So, tell me, what is the exacerbating factor? Is it perhaps a case of his, your profiler?"

Bedelia smiles the smile she reserves for Hannibal-or so he imagines-reserved and void of sincerity. Prodding.

"The absence of one," she says.

"Hm."

"Graham tells me he was happy to dream of the hill and the tree, because it meant there was another angle to explore in an ongoing case."

"It must have been ongoing for quite some time," Hannibal says.

"They're chasing the Chesapeake Ripper."

"Ah. And what has changed?"

"The Ripper has stopped killing. There are no more trails for him to follow."

"And so his anxiety mounts. There is no one to fill the night with terrors, so he must do it himself," Hannibal says.

And by sheer will alone he stops the trembling of his fingers. The air has thickened, the scents within the room now carrying the bright metallic note of the unexplored. He won't allow his eyes to slip closed when in front of Bedelia, but he settles the rim of his wine glass gently against his upper lip and breathes in possibility.

"What a crushing burden," says Hannibal, "especially to impose on oneself. I understand your desire to see it relieved, for Mr. Graham's sake. But I don't believe this is something I can help you with."

"I'm not asking for help, Hannibal. Only an opinion."

"In my opinion, then, despite aggressive intervention, your patient may require something that neither you nor I can provide."

If Bedelia hears the untruth of it, her rational mind will override the knowledge, simply because it is unfathomable. Hannibal's smile is knowing and sad. That Bedelia cannot fathom, even after having known violence-embraced and wrestled with it-provides him a buffer to her scrutiny. He sees a world where all things are possible-has done so many with his own hands-and by that grace it is he, not Bedelia, whose sight is limitless.

If Hannibal Lecter had known that this Mr. Graham gave presentations to students at the FBI Academy and, occasionally, elsewhere-in a halting monotone that made him the subject of either mockery or suspicion-he might have tried to attend one. As an interested party. He had passed himself off before as a medical examiner; he certainly had the requisite knowledge.

In truth, Hannibal doesn't even know the man's first name, but it is not something he needs to parlay Bedelia into relinquishing with another night of veiled courting. He has everything he requires to initiate contact with Graham. Though it will hardly be an initiation; they have been speaking with one another for nearly two years.

Even more, the communication is done in the intimate cipher of familiarity, read and understood at once by those who know its symbols. The pleasure of the connection for Hannibal is already heavy, but he wants nothing more than to deepen it. Alone in his office, he closes his eyes at last, visualizes a lone tree at the crest of a hill. It has no leaves, nor will it ever. It is static, seasonless, perfect. When he opens his eyes again, the path unfolds before him. It has always been there, of course, and is littered with his footprints, yet it winds over a half-obscured horizon. The partial concealment excites him most of all.

The young woman is moaning still when he navigates below her scapulae, between ribs, first manually then with the whittled points of the stags' antlers that make up the altar. His offering, his overture.

The construction itself had been difficult, entailing binding the thorny, amputated racks together with baling wire-double-gloved for the sake of discretion-so that they would stand steady even on shifting ground.

The woman, with long, dark hair, not plain-looking yet not of captivating beauty by any stretch, had blown the smoke from her foul clove cigarette into Hannibal's face at a café, when he politely requested she move on so he could enjoy his _espresso con panna_. The newly sharpened points of a long-dead buck slide through the flesh of her abdomen with much more ease, slowing only when the supple skin of youth, still underlaid with fat, tents before breaking, as if her pelvic bone had sprouted thorns.

Appropriate, Hannibal thinks, and allows himself to be briefly aroused.

She does not bleed much now, having done most of it in Hannibal's shower as he cut a semicircle below her ribs and into the peritoneum to remove her liver.

The skin surrounding her lips is blue. Pressing on her sternum to complete the impalement, Hannibal feels her heart stop beating. The heat of her body leaves in curls against the pre-dawn sky.

He takes off the gloves, folding them neatly one inside the other, and prepares for the two-mile walk back to his car, unburdened and expectant.

The discovery splashes across the online news outlets, with the degree of headline sensationalism depending on the reputability of the source. Hannibal does not read the articles themselves; he knows his meaning is taken.

And he waits in his home for the inevitable: another visit from Bedelia. The risk that she may go to the authorities first is really no risk at all, calculated or not. Hannibal balances his plan on the fulcrum of her burgeoning self-doubt, and he is not disappointed.

She comes, unannounced, at ten-thirty in the evening, long after the street has gone quiet. This does not concern Hannibal; he is quieter still than the restless Baltimore night. For as attentive as he is to the infliction of agony, he prefers that it received with the silence of resignation and despair, rather than with protest. He eschews disarray; he is precision drawn to a point. The needle of his intent is so fine as to be invisible until it pierces the unguarded eye. As the doorbell chime sounds, he thumbs a button on the tiny remote next to his hand, and the first carefully placed notes of Chopin's Nocturne No. 2 in E-Flat swim forth from the speakers of his Blaupunkt sound system. When he rises from his seat by the fireplace, he hopes that Mr. Graham is asleep and dreaming of the solitary tree and watchful stag. Always watchful.

"Bedelia," he says. "What brings you to my door at this hour?"

"Questions, Hannibal." There is something aside from indignation that moves through the stony set of her face. Bedelia is masterful at obfuscation even still-after all she was one of his tutors, if inadvertently-but he identifies the sweet and dark undercurrent to her affect within seconds of her stepping into his foyer.

It is terror. And the sudden satisfaction of his knowing branches through him, sparks his fingertips like matchheads. He breathes deeply into it before speaking again.

"Anything I can answer for you, I will," he says.

"Thank you," she says. "May I sit down?"

"I'll join you in the parlor with a glass of wine."

"No," she says. "Thank you. It's very late, and I won't be staying long."

He tips his chin, acquiesces. For a moment he lets himself admire her courage, so sweetly and utterly undermined by her lingering disbelief.

Hannibal ushers Bedelia into the sitting room, low-lit and wrapped in music that eddies around the fixtures with each piano trill like a living thing. He smiles, crosses one leg over the other, palms resting on the worsted of his slacks. It is an invitation and also a provocation, demonstrating to her that of the two of them he will not be the one to dispense with the pleasantries. He will force her to do so.

"Frankly," she says, after a pause. "I'm troubled."

"Does this have anything to do with the patient who attacked you in your office? Quite a traumatic event, I'm sure."

As strained as she is, Bedelia understands immediately that the remark is a taunt, after the fashion of the rhetorical game they share. She is appalled, and fails to hide it for the barest sliver of a second, but then it is gone. Bedelia refuses to be drawn easily into emotional outburst. That mortal assumption, again, that the scales are untipped.

"I'd prefer to talk about my current patient, Hannibal."

"Which?"

"Will Graham."

_Will_, Hannibal thinks. An ironic name, considering the inherent passivity of empathy. Still, to be so receptive as to invite the force of an outside personality-dozens of them-to intermingle with and suffuse his own, perhaps this Graham sees a kind of purity in complete relinquishment. The idea appeals to Hannibal on a visceral level. He is accustomed to defiance, struggle sometimes to the last breath. Someone capable of unqualified surrender could either bend to him untouched, or slip like smoke through his fingers. A man unused to trepidation, Hannibal believes he could savor either prospect with equal relish.

"I see," he says. "Have his nightmares gotten worse?"

"Don't play with me, Hannibal. You read the newspapers."

"The development in his case, then," Hannibal says.

"I need to ask you very frankly if you've told any of your patients-anyone else-about the conversation you and I had regarding Will Graham," Bedelia says.

_Oh, no_, Hannibal thinks. Evasion, and clumsily done, at that. An eleventh-hour attempt to rationalize away gnawing doubt. The sturdy cord of his patience snaps, the ends flutter, lifeless.

He shakes his head. "Bedelia."

"I am running out of explanations, Hannibal." Desperation has now reached her voice. "Coincidence doesn't cut it. The dream; that girl, _mounted_ like she was, displayed like that. No one reached into Will Graham's head, into _mine_. I don't accept it."

"Then I am afraid," Hannibal says, "we have nothing more to talk about."

He sees her recognize, in the breath of silence that hangs between them, that she is going to die. From the speakers, Daniel Barenboim picks out a deliberate series of notes, clinging to the tempo's very edge, making them sigh.

Hannibal permits himself a brief moment to grieve the intellectual loss, the degradation of his and Bedelia's interaction. The term over which he had known her had been educational.

Then she is up and out of her chair, tottering as the heel of her pump skids on the wood floor. Hannibal hopes it won't leave a mark.

With one hand, he grabs her wrist, and with the other, guides her head by its shining blonde hair in a swift arc to the edge of the table. The sound of her fracturing skull is muted; she barely releases a breath as she falls, dazed beyond hope but not unconscious.

From his breast pocket, Hannibal removes a pair of nitrile gloves, unpowdered. At his feet, Bedelia breathes in whining gasps. She attempts to turn over, but only succeeds in sinking her cheek into the pool of blood that is blossoming below it. Hannibal takes a moment to fold the rug over twice, cradling Bedelia's head as he uses the rug to pillow it. It won't do to give the blood a chance to permeate the fine veneer. Around them, the piano piece ends, and another follows on its heels, this one in a major key.

Hannibal stops to retrieve a small object from a locked drawer in the secretary in his study's antechamber before returning Bedelia to her office. It is a short drive, and the blood from her wound has thankfully begun to slow. He uses her keys, places her inside, regretting the indignity of having to hammer her skull against the lip of her desk. This time, afterward, she makes no sound.

Her eyelids flutter as he presses gloved thumbs to her larynx, leaning with his weight into the task. The hyoid bone breaks almost immediately, and still he presses. He hears only his breathing, deep and even. Silence reigns in her office as he sits back on his heels.

Tucking the gloves away, Hannibal removes a vial from his coat pocket, and uses a pair of forceps to lay a single hair-harvested from the floor of this very office after Bedelia had torn it from her attacker's head-on the lapel of her suit jacket. He does not return her handbag; he will burn it later.

Two deaths in quick succession, and all to reap a promise. But such a promise is Will Graham that Hannibal thinks it more than earned.


	2. Icebound

On the first truly cold day of the season, which heralds the oncoming winter, Bedelia DuMaurier is laid in the ground. Hannibal wears an understated suit of charcoal grey virgin wool. A deep claret cashmere scarf is wound around his neck and falls along the placket of his bespoke frock coat.

Attendance is sparse at the memorial, and sparser graveside, but Hannibal does not endure the endless distasteful sermonizing without reason. Peripheral to the small group of largely dry-eyed mourners is a slim man in an ill-fitting suit. He doesn't stand so much as hover, shifting from foot to foot, kinetic. He is swaddled in a too-large corduroy barn coat and wears a wool fisherman's cap, but is obviously still freezing.

The first cold snap is always a hard fall. Human memory is poor, and lulled into complacency by the respite of Indian summer, year after year.

The man grimaces and blows into ungloved hands, breath rising from the cup of his palms. This must, Hannibal thinks, be Will Graham.

What strikes Hannibal most resoundingly about the man is not the list of ways in which the two of them are different from one another-Hannibal is clean shaven and groomed where Will has wild curls emerging from underneath the hat and the shadow of a beard tracing his jawline. It is the way in which they are different together. Despite a body that rolls and wavers like television static, Will Graham places his gaze not only with intent but with acuity. He transcribes each detail of the headstone, traces the entire line of the low horizon, notes the minute imbalances in the cradle of rope used to lower Bedelia DuMaurier's coffin into the hard earth. His brow is furrowed, face clouded but eyes clear, very clear. He looks, and he sees all, with the exception of faces, which allows Hannibal to study his without interruption.

It is the unequivocal fulfillment of a two-year dialogue, by which Hannibal remains faceless yet eminently _perceived_.

Which is why he is careful, as he steps toward the road and then turns for a final look at Bedelia's resting place, to train his focus on the open ground before them, and not at the man beside him.

"Did you know her well?" Hannibal asks.

In his peripheral field, he sees Graham shake his head. "Uh, no. Not really," he says. "Did you?"

"We were colleagues," says Hannibal. "Though I had not seen her in a long time. I saw the article in the newspaper. Very shocking."

"Not really," Graham says.

"Hm. Do you know how it happened, if it isn't improper to ask? I read only that the police think it was an attack by a patient."

"The same patient who attacked her five and a half months ago. _That_ didn't make the papers."

Hannibal detects the barest note of something hidden in Graham's bitter words. Guilt? "You say you did not know her well. Yet you seem to know quite a bit about the circumstances of her death. May I ask, are you with the police?"

Graham laughs, shakes his head again. "No. FBI."

"Then it is certainly a more complicated matter than I had thought," says Hannibal.

For the first time, Graham looks over at him, not at his eyes but at his mouth instead. "No, sorry," he says. "They have the patient in custody. It's not a federal matter. Bedelia-uh, Dr. DuMaurier-consulted for us, occasionally. The Behavioral Analysis Unit."

"I see. In that case, I am sorry for your loss. She was...uniquely perceptive."

"Yeah, actually. She was," says Graham.

Hannibal extends his hand, shielded as it is with a lambskin glove. "Hannibal Lecter."

Graham returns the handshake, but still does not make eye contact. "Will Graham."

The cold of Will's hand permeates the leather. In tightening his grip, Hannibal takes a moment to play his fingertips across the thin but strong metacarpal bones, manipulating...barely, barely. The cool impression remains after the contact ends. Will's nose and cheeks are red.

"So you're also a psychiatrist?" Will asks. "We could use another professional to consult."

"I am. And you do not mince words," Hannibal says.

Will's blush is visible even on the wind-chapped cheeks. Hannibal smells the blood beneath his skin. There is something odd about it, a fleeting top note to Will's peculiar fragrance, and it irritates him that he cannot quite identify it.

"Sorry," Will says. "I'm really not very good in situations like this. Or any situation."

"I doubt that's true," says Hannibal, "Or you wouldn't have the job you do."

Will watches his shoes shift on the frozen ground. "You're right. I'm good at one thing. I'm a very specialized tool."

There is bitterness in the statement, but also a kind of detached awe, as if Will places his ability somehow outside of himself, marked as other.

"Now you have my interest," Hannibal says. "Would you care to talk further?" The bright stones of the trail ahead are revealed in swift waves like the raising of gooseflesh, illuminating the direction in which he already looks.

"I don't think I can handle being psychoanalyzed today," says Will.

"No analysis," Hannibal says. " I only offer an ear, not an opinion, unless you say otherwise."

Will laughs again. For the first time in a long while, Hannibal enjoys the way a sound splits the silence, only because it is unexpected. In his practice, and elsewhere, he has become far too used to hearing misery wrung from placid faces; it excites him to hear mirth from one so grim. It frost-rimed spring set against a late-falling warm spell-one easily crushed once the tough exterior is shattered, but the other robust in its insubordination to encroaching gloom.

"I can honestly say this is a first," Will says. "A happy hour bitch session about work after a funeral. A little inappropriate if you think about it."

"On the contrary," says Hannibal. "I believe holding a conversation honors Bedelia. Talk is, after all, what she did best."

"Fair enough," Will says, removing his cap and scrubbing his palm over his mussed hair. The tracery of vapor released is only just visible against a sky threatening snow. "Do you know of any good places to get a coffee? I don't live around here."

"As a matter of fact," Hannibal says, "I know the perfect place."

"This looks like a house," Will says, as Hannibal guides his Bentley into the cul-de-sac.

"This is my house," Hannibal tells him, turning the car into the driveway.

"Unorthodox," says Will, but Hannibal sees his fingers flex as he grips the door handle tighter. He has rested at least one hand on it during the entire ride.

"What is there to apply orthodoxy to? You yourself remarked on the unusual nature of our meeting." Hannibal pauses, turns the key; the engine flutters and is still. "And besides, you are not my patient."

"I don't want to impose," says Will. His eyes, pupils in pinpoint, flicker back and forth over the interior of the car.

"It's no imposition. I had planned to cook for one, but I always make too much." Hannibal opens the passenger side door. "And I _detest_ leftovers.

Will waits a beat before unlatching his seatbelt. When he glances up to see that Hannibal's mouth is smiling, he mirrors the expression, and follows him inside.

Hannibal had bound a filling of liver mousse (made from the sweet and healthy liver of the girl who had served to unite him with Will Graham-it would only be apropos of their first meal) into a pheasant basted with thyme and amontillado beurre blanc. By the time he draws it out of the oven, the bird's flesh is crisp and the filling sizzles within its hollowed carcass.

Will has sat and at the breakfast table and sipped strong coffee, watching Hannibal work with the sort of reverence that suggests near-complete ignorance of culinary practice. Teasing flakes of snow have begun to spin outside the window. Hannibal has only to caress the twine that holds the fragrant foie gras within the bird with the edge of a Wüsthof filleting knife, and its bounty spills forth. A cornucopia brought from the frozen edge of winter.

Watching Will Graham close his eyes as the first tendrils of the rich scent reach his nose satisfies Hannibal so fully that he could push the meal aside and be content. Instead, he portions out two slices of plump breast onto a bed of wilted arugula, and spoons the steaming pâté beside it. He offers Will a glass of dry sherry, which he accepts.

"I think you missed your calling, Dr. Lecter," says Will, after the first bite.

"One can have many, I think. Still, thank you. I enjoy cooking for myself, but the greatest pleasure is cooking for others."

"Did you ever cook for Bedelia?"

"No, I don't believe I did. We had, as I said, grown apart. Professional pressures."

Will nods and takes an inelegant swig of the sherry.

"So, tell me," Hannibal says, "about your own 'calling?'"

"It's hardly that," Will says. "It's more just who I am. It's like, I can look at what someone has done, and all of it, all of the details, become a tunnel right into their mind. I can look out with their eyes, almost feel what they felt."

"That sort of empathy is very strong, and very rare," says Hannibal.

"Yeah," Will says. "That's what I keep hearing. Jack Crawford-he's the head of the BAU, where I work, he brought me in on the Ripper case."

"The Chesapeake Ripper, I assume."

Will nods. "Not that Jack doesn't find other uses for me. The BAU has no shortage of cases."

"It sounds as though these additional cases are a burden."

"They're a distraction. I want to save lives, god knows I do. But the Ripper's list of victims already outstrips the body count in most of our other cases combined. And there could be more, more that were just never found. The Ripper, he's not like the others. He's not like anyone."

"You speak as if you know him," Hannibal says.

"In a way, I do," says Will. "There are certain things that I see, through his eyes, pieces of his design. And then other parts are blocked, like looking at an incomplete puzzle."

"His design?"

Will pauses, his fork mid-way to his mouth. He looks down at the plate. "It's just, well, a word I use. A murder is never one act. It's made up of everything that comes before and after. The design is just all of it, sort of compressed."

"You are able to see it all at once," Hannibal says.

"Except with the Ripper. He's so good. Not good, clever. He knows how to hide, but more than that, he knows how to hide his methods."

"And what would you do if you caught him?"

Will lays the fork on the plate, tines down, bodily need forgotten in the urgency of experience. "I want to look at his face, his hands, study them, see what makes him what he is. Watch what he does to pass himself off as human."

"You don't believe he's human?" Hannibal asks.

"I don't believe he thinks of himself as human."

"And aren't you afraid if you look too hard you'll begin to lose your humanity as well?" Hannibal asks. "In your unique position that is a risk, yes?"

Will Graham smiles again, down at his plate. "I don't think so. I know who I am."

"How did the discovery of the Ripper's latest victim affect you?"

"Marisa Schuur," Will says, and Hannibal finally knows the young woman's name. "I was sad. And then angry. But there was something else. You'll probably think I'm crazy if I tell you."

"I think you are many things, Will, but crazy is not one of them."

Will startles at the sound of his own name pronounced. "Is that a professional opinion?"

"It could be, if you like," Hannibal says. "I doubt my assessment would change much were I listening as a psychiatrist rather than just a friend."

The word "friend" causes Will to flinch again, and he meets Hannibal's gaze for a brief time. His eyes are blue. For a moment, Hannibal thinks he has overstepped his bounds. But then, Will says, "Good to know," and picks the fork up once again, spearing a shred of tender pheasant and dragging it through the ridges of cooling foie gras on his plate.

They eat a while in silence. When Will finally speaks, he says, "When they found Marisa Schuur's body, what I felt more than anything else was relief."

"How so?"

"It felt like I had a line in to the Ripper again," Will says. "He stopped for a while. It's not unusual; most serial killers have hiatus periods. But when this one disappears, the trail dries up. And I don't know what to do with myself. The Chesapeake Ripper has been the only constant in my life for more than two years. I sort of...went mad without that contact. I started having nightmares. That's why I was seeing Bedelia."

"So Bedelia was not only a consultant to your department," Hannibal says.

"Oh, she was," says Will, the bitterness in his voice undisguised now. "She briefed Jack Crawford on the state of my mental well-being."

"Regardless, it was helpful to speak with her, I hope?"

Will sniffs, tosses down the remainder of the sherry in his glass. "_Was_ being the operative word. I have somewhat of a problem with keeping up relationships, Dr. Lecter, professional or otherwise. Has something to do with making people uncomfortable."

"You don't make me uncomfortable. And you may call me 'Hannibal,' if you like." He upends the bottle of sherry over the mouth of Will's glass, allowing the last tawny trickles to wend down the bulb, to merge in irreproducible patterns until they disappear. "Now, since you seem to have such difficulty maintaining relationships, can you at least assure me that my association with you won't also be fatal?"

Will's face freezes, jaw clenched, until he is able to discern-by piecing together Hannibal's facial expression in a series of near-panicked glances-that it is a joke. Then he laughs, but from that split second of confusion Hannibal learns how difficult it is sometimes for Will to trace the vicissitudes of human emotions as they unfold. Will Graham lives as he works: using observation and mimicry to assemble a simulacrum of understanding. He sees the design, as he says, in tableau-oblate and concurrent. Only upon study does nuance emerge, but the unrelenting pace of social interaction does not often allow for reflection of that kind. Hannibal watches as the tension in Will's rigid shoulders is picked out of its knots and falls away, the slow unfurling of a fiddlehead, and understands in an instant the battle it can be for Will simply to appear normal.

It is a struggle not entirely unfamiliar to Hannibal himself.

Later, the dinner dishes still on the table, as Hannibal drives Will back to his car, Will thanks him.

"I hope you don't think I took unfair advantage of you," Will says.

"Not at all," says Hannibal. "Why would you think so?"

Will shrugs. "Because I unloaded on you like it was a therapy session. You've got your own coping to do."

"Bedelia's death left gaps that need to be filled somehow," Hannibal says. "And I am a psychiatrist. I can no more stop doing what I do than you can."

"I can't stop taking things apart. That's true. Sometimes it's nice to talk with somebody who kind of does the same thing."

"Agreed," Hannibal says. "If you'll forgive me for saying so, I feel like I have known you for much longer than I have."

"Good," says Will. "Then I'm not the only one."

Hannibal pulls out a business card, removes a Montblanc ballpoint from his coat pocket and scrawls his cell phone number on the back. "Call me if you ever need to 'unload' again."

This time, Will's laugh is immediate.

The call comes no sooner than Hannibal might have expected, and no later than he would have desired. The timing pleases him nearly as much as the contact, in that both were anticipated. Drawing on prevailing social cues, Will would have put off calling so quickly after their meeting that it seemed hurried or forced, tucking aside any emergent psychological distress spurred either by his case load or by Bedelia's death. Then he would have waited longer still-a demonstration both of quiet pride and of self-sufficiency integral to his meticulous construction of generalized masculine identity.

Hannibal cultivates little regard for the persistence of societal expectation outside of that which allows him to work uninterrupted. In fact, the subversion of it as a solitary pursuit he finds gratifying in the extreme. Whereas he manifests terror and depredation, Will internalizes it, but the act of it for each man sets him to rights, maintains his course. Will is not who he chooses to be without Hannibal, the perfect foil. Which makes the choice entirely Hannibal's, as it should be.

This time, he offers to make the long drive to Will's home in Wolf Trap, Virginia. He also spares them both the indignity of a poor meal by offering to bring dinner in appreciation of Will's hospitality.

The long driveway is rutted and unkempt, the house's exterior weathered. Smoke from a fireplace or stove reaches upward, pale against the low sky, bringing with it the scent of wet, green wood and, below it, a sour animal reek. At the sound of the engine, the front door opens, spilling light, and Will, and a minor flood of smaller, wriggling forms that tumble across the porch and down the stairs.

To Will's credit, Hannibal thinks, at least the dogs don't bark. Swishing tails and prodding noses tap at the protective layer of Hannibal's overcoat, leaving fur and small wet streaks but venturing no further. In a way, it makes sense for this to be Will's home, though Hannibal doubts Will himself sees the particular design he has constructed for himself in all its facets.

"Jake! Winston! Shaye!," Will shouts. "Leave him alone. Come!"

The dogs wheel and follow their master's voice, a torrent of ticking and scrabbling claws on the battered boards of the porch as they dance.

Hannibal removes the willow basket from the passenger seat and shuts the door.

"They probably smell the food," Will says. "Come on in. I promise there's a clean place to sit."

The animals converge, all rippling backs and breath into the freezing air, first around Will then around Hannibal once again. He extends a gloved hand, allows a large, golden-red dog to sniff the fingertips.

Hannibal places the delicate pastry shells on a sheet of aluminum foil in Will's oven, coaxes it to a low heat. It is clean, but by virtue of disuse rather than fastidiousness. He regrets, as he reheats the thick filling for the _vol au vents_, that he took no more of Marisa Schuur, but it would have disrupted the aesthetic unforgivably. Asymmetry is repugnant to Hannibal, which is why he continues to nurture the connection with Will Graham, out of his element and amid a crowd of dogs fouler than beggars. They lift their muzzles and strain with wet eyes as Hannibal slowly stirs in the liver gravy. At least he can give that, he thinks, and smiles into fragrant steam.

Darkness is dropping through the clouds as Hannibal and Will walk, after their meal. Oncoming night seeps into a daylight that had never quite appeared. But clouds were comfort in this season; there was no pity to be had from either cold or brightness on clear winter days.

The lights in Will's little house slide around tree shadows in the intervening distance, and Will keeps looking backward at them, as if to assure himself of their continued presence.

"I used to talk to Bedelia about my dreams," he says.

"Do they bother you?" Hannibal asks. "Your dreams?"

"Not anymore," Will says. "Not really."

Hannibal gives his undivided attention as Will relays the dreams about the stag and the tree. It is easier, somehow, to hear it all as if for the first time, with the entire world hushed but for their footfalls, silence and light orbiting Will Graham as inexorably as the bodies of his dogs.

"Do you hunt?" Hannibal asks.

"Like, deer hunting? No. I fish sometimes in spring, before it gets too hot. Do you?"

"Do I fish?"

"Do you hunt? You cooked a pheasant."

Hannibal laughs. "I merely employ a resourceful butcher." He pauses. "Do you think the stag in your dreams represents a hunt of some sort? Your search for the Chesapeake Ripper?"

"I thought it might for a while," Will says.

"What changed your mind?"

"The change in the dream when the Ripper stopped killing. I don't feel like I'm the one who's being hunted; somehow that's too hokey." Will shakes his head, baring his teeth in the rictus that twists his features when he concentrates. Or rather, when he turns his perception to the crenellated and confounding landscape of the internal. "It's more like, I guess, it's something in me, something unbearably ugly that needs an outlet."

"The Ripper as catharsis," Hannibal says. "Intriguing."

"Yeah, I don't know," says Will, bending to pick up a good-sized stick in his path and tossing it into the dark, away from the house. Two dogs race along its path and out of sight. That they cleave to inevitability with such joy is something for which Hannibal can muster a bit of respect.

A chorus of barking spills out of the darkness a few moments later. Will whistles, fingers between his lips.

The dogs come bounding back. One carries something in its mouth, and it is not the thrown stick but a mangled rabbit. Its white fur is matted with blood and the head hangs at an impossible angle. Bright viscera trail from its opened belly. One hind paw dangles from a sinew, dancing and waving with the agitated motion of the dog's head.

"Drop it," Will commands. The big dog releases his prize, but with reluctance. The little carcass tumbles to the earth at Will's feet. Will's dogs did not kill the rabbit; likely they frightened off whatever other predator had staked its claim first.

"Ugh," Will says. "Sorry."

"No need." Hannibal reaches down, hand still gloved, and scratches behind the big dog's ears. "You should never apologize for something that it is only doing what is in its nature to do."

The incident stays with Hannibal; he recalls it with easy pleasure. The earnest way in which Will Graham sought to excuse the animal's behavior, as though there were anything at all to excuse. His disgust at the eviscerated corpse of a rabbit, when he plies his trade in examining the ruined corpses of men. For all his self-imposed solitude in the famously harsh wilderness, Hannibal understands now that one man killing another, especially with intent-design-falls entirely outside of Will's personal taxonomy. Despite, even in defiance of, its frequency, murder to him is an interruption of natural order, rather than an extension. Perhaps it is a defense mechanism, a buffer against the wearing down of indignation that would preclude his performing at his job. It is a state of mind that has, in all honesty, never occurred to Hannibal, and he plans to devote significant time to its study at some point.

Nevertheless, when he sees the blonde boy-the pale skin of his arms darkened by tattoos-guide his skateboard through a flailing group of foreign tourists at the Inner Harbor, he is unable to resist.

Later that night, Hannibal carefully slices each tattoo from the boy's body, one by one, a process that takes hours and leaves him perspiring. The boy has either slipped into shock or has aspirated a portion of the handkerchief used to gag him before Hannibal begins to gouge out tender portions of meat from forearms and calves, wrapping and sealing them neatly.

Near the end of it, Hannibal slides a scalpel into the tough discs of cartilage between the second and third cervical vertebrae and severs the spinal cord. There is no breath left to rattle when he removes the makeshift gag. As much as he would like to, Hannibal doesn't cut into either of the boy's feet. Though later, when he has driven the cooling body to a snow-dusted field in lower Carroll County, Maryland, he will open the belly and pull out the loop of the transverse colon to leave on the ground.

A snare.

In spite of his heaving breath and shaking voice, the first thing out of Will's mouth when he calls Hannibal a few nights later is an apology.

"What's happened, Will?"

"The Ripper. Another body," he gasps, as if it is an explanation.

It is incumbent upon Hannibal to remain calm, provide a voice of reason to thread through the punctured plane of his agitated state. "And you know it's him?"

"It has to be."

"Why?"

"It just is. Listen, my dream-"

"I had thought the Ripper quieted your dreams," Hannibal says.

"He does. He used to. I don't know what happened," Will says, the panic tenacious in his voice. "The stag, I dreamed it was behind me again. I could hear it, even smell it. It smelled like death. But it touched me this time. Or something did. But it wasn't an animal. I felt a _hand_ on my shoulder. I woke up in a lake of sweat."

"Stay there, Will. Stay where you are. I'll come and get you."

"The dogs-"

"They'll be taken care of," Hannibal says. "You're in no fit state to be by yourself."

Will opens the door when he arrives, and the scent hits Hannibal with such force he must fight not to stagger back. It is a burning smell, and sweet like overripe fruit already tipping into swift decline. Something autoimmune, probably encephalitis, with attendant fever. Asleep, in a state of opened consciousness, Will had smelled his own brain cooking.

"Hannibal," Will says.

Hannibal walks through the house, to the bedroom, throws shirts and jeans over his arm and tucks a pair of socks into his pocket. Will is still sitting by the door, head in his hands, in a soaked t-shirt and boxer briefs.

"I need you to get dressed, Will," says Hannibal. "Can you do that for me?"

Will nods. His face is ashen.

He sleeps on the drive back to Baltimore, but it is fitful, his cheek pressed to the cold window and fists clenched, eyes roaming underneath their lids. Surveying the distorted landscape his mind is presenting.

Hannibal must support him bodily on their way into the house. Will voices no objections as Hannibal peels off the layers of clothing-corduroys, henley shirt, underclothes still soaked and redolent with fear-sweat. Once Will is ensconced in the guest bed, the eiderdown pad removed for the sake of keeping him cool, Hannibal drapes a sheet over his recumbent form. Will recoils from the touch of the fabric as if burned.

"Sleep, Will," says Hannibal.

"I don't want to. Please."

"You're safe now," Hannibal says.

"Stay," Will says, his eyes glassy.

"You need your rest."

Will surges forward, the sheet snapping with the force of it. He grips Hannibal's wrist with one hand, and the other he places, fumbling, at Hannibal's groin, pushing into the fabric of his coat.

Hannibal pries each hand away in turn, pushing Will back to the bed and arranging his hands, one atop the other, on his fluttering chest. He brushes a lank curl from Will's forehead and places his own cool palm over the fevered skin.

"You must sleep. You'll see me when you wake up. There is nothing to worry about. Not here."

Will relents with a stricken expression, and squeezes his eyes shut, pressing his head back into the pillow.

He clutches at the sheet that lays across his midsection, fingers digging in, a sore test of the fine fabric.

He feeds ragged exhalations to the air above the bed, a purge of nightmares.

But he does not open his eyes again.

Hannibal stands at the door until he hears the harsh breaths even and draw out, stumbling at last into the rhythm of sleep. He stands so long and so still at the threshold that his muscles begin to resist the strain. Only when he shifts to quiet their complaint does he realize he is so hard that he aches. Just as he did beside the body of Marisa Schuur, he allows the sensation to dwell for a moment. Then he removes his coat and takes a book from the library. Choosing the armchair closest to the door, Hannibal reads, and listens.


	3. The Hart in Winter

The sound that wakes Hannibal is a sporadic metallic ringing. He stirs in the armchair, sees the coat still draped across the back, and the book fallen to the floor.

Will Graham is in his kitchen, barefoot but clad in the jeans and work shirt that Hannibal had left folded by the guest bed.

"I was trying to make coffee," Will says, closing a cabinet. He stands and looks at his hands rather than at Hannibal's face. "I can't find anything."

"Thank you, Will. I'm afraid I have my own peculiar system of organization. We'll use the Chemex this morning," Hannibal says, drawing an hourglass-shaped container from a high cabinet. Into the mouth of the container he nestles a conical filter of unbleached paper. The sharp and rich scent of grinding coffee fills the room. Hannibal pours hot water from a silver carafe over the grounds in the filter. Will is still on his feet, leaning against the butcher's block in the center of the tiled floor, looking very much as though he does not know what to do with his limbs. He fondles worn patches on the shirt and picks at his collar, shuffling his feet.

Hannibal, who removes thin slices of cured pancetta (thankfully free of the residual taint of tattoo ink) from his dry storage cupboard, notices his guest's unease, but does not comment on it.

"Thanks again for, uh, rescuing me," says Will.

"No thanks necessary." At a twist of Hannibal's fingers, blue points of flame leap to life below the cast-iron grate on the stove. "You were in a bad state."

"I remember you coming to the house, and I remember driving here," Will says. "It was very, very cold."

"You had a mild fever," Hannibal tells him, paring off thin slivers of radish and parsnip as the oil in the pan begins to sizzle. "Do you remember anything further?" He pushes the translucent slices, half-moons of red amid them like paper cuts, into the pan, then gently empties two eggs into a stovetop poacher.

Will looks guilty, the level of his psychomotor agitation increases. Still, he says, "No. I don't."

"The fever may have spiked," Hannibal says, reducing the heat beneath the stainless steel pan, and moving to Will's side. "May I?"

Will raises his head and allows Hannibal to place his hand, warm from its proximity to the stovetop, on his forehead. He looks to the side, but his pointed avoidance of Hannibal's gaze is not unprecedented. Although Will breathes through his nose, Hannibal cannot help but smell the underlayer of disturbed sweetness that pervades the man's scent. He allows his hand to linger just a moment beyond what is comfortable for Will, then briefly rests the back of his hand against Will's cheek. He is warm, but it is a bed-warmth, a morning warmth, and the fever for now has subsided.

"You're within a normal temperature range," Hannibal says.

"That's good," says Will, turning his head, clearly fighting the urge to step outside the tense circle of Hannibal's closeness. "I need to go into work."

"I believe you can," says Hannibal, relenting and returning to the stove.

"Shit," says Will. "My car."

"I'd be more than happy to drive you there, seeing as you are my hostage at this point," Hannibal smiles as he folds a sliver of salted gastrocnemius from the skateboarding boy's calf atop a poached egg, shaving Himalayan pink salt and Indonesian black peppercorns onto the stack.

Will says nothing, but moves to the breakfast table and pours coffee into his mug until it shivers at the brim.

The smoke-blue Bentley draws stares at the complex at Quantico, to which Hannibal pays no mind. He parks in a dim and cantilevered institutional hell of a parking garage and, for once, allows Will to lead the way.

As it turns out, Jack Crawford is a huge and imposing man, with enough residual muscle mass to have once been military or beat police, but now tethered to a desk and showing the inevitable softness around the middle.

Will's default attitude toward Crawford is one of deference that borders on timidity. Hannibal is certain within minutes that the BAU chief is a force of personality, but not as sure he deserves the trembling he evokes in his inferiors. Perhaps there is something about his relationship to Will that exacerbates the latter's condition.

"Jack," says Will, "This is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He was a colleague of Bedelia's."

Crawford's hand is fleshy, the handshake forceful, but far from crushing. "Dr. Lecter," Crawford says. "Good to meet you. Our Will is resourceful. Has all kinds of professionals up his sleeve."

By this, Hannibal surmises that Will had been seeing Bedelia even prior to her coming on as a consultant to the BAU. He spares Will, who is still within earshot, the indignity of looking over for confirmation of his theory.

"Will is exceptional," Hannibal says. "An asset to your team, as I'm sure you know."

Crawford only nods, and laces his fingers behind his back. As much as Hannibal would like to look over at Will, to gauge his reaction, he resists.

Two more agents, a woman with long, dark hair, and a bearded man, enter the room.

"Dr. Lecter," Crawford says, "you're welcome to sit in on the briefing. Though I don't think I need to remind you that nothing you hear goes beyond the walls of this room."

"You can be assured of my professional discretion, Agent Crawford."

When Crawford gives a monarchic nod toward the agents at the back of the room, one of them reaches over to dim the lights and, at the push of a button on a digital remote, a photo flickers onto the screen at the front of the room.

It is the torn body of the white-haired boy, his clouded blue eyes open to the camera, bouquets of frozen blood blossoming lace-edged across his arms and legs. _Much_ more aesthetically appealing than the vulgar and poorly executed tattoos.

"Jason Markwell, age seventeen," Crawford says. "Discovered on a stretch of state-owned land in Carroll County, just outside of Eldersburg. Death was caused by a complete severing of the spinal cord, via a small incision in the back of the neck. Extensive laceration, large sections of skin removed, along with muscle tissue in both arms and one leg. All internal organs were intact, but the autopsy indicates most of the damage was inflicted pre-mortem. Jason Markwell suffered for hours before he died."

Crawford hits the button again. The pale sculpture of Marisa Schuur's body-stark white flesh against ivory bone where she and the altar of horns intersected-appears on the screen.

"And I'm sure we all remember Marisa Schuur. Found within four weeks of the latest victim," Crawford says. "The brutality of the killings, the removal of trophies, the advanced anatomical knowledge-all of it points to the work of the Chesapeake Ripper."

Crawford's words are terse, but the minutes attenuate in Hannibal's view, stretching into a luminous distance. He is, after all, witnessing a retrospective of his work. He sets his face in a mask of detached and studious concern.

Crawford continues. "The Ripper had been dormant for seven to eight months, and now we have two deaths in very quick succession. We're looking at the shortest span between murders that we have witnessed over the course of this case. The only conclusion we can draw is that he is escalating. We will escalate in turn, and we will match him, and overtake him. When serial murderers kill rapid-fire like this, they get sloppy. When they get sloppy is when we take them down."

Looking over at Will, Hannibal sees he is not watching the screen. But then, of course, he doesn't need to. The flat and static photographs likely provide poor representation of the diorama that unfolds in his head. While the other agents in the room are viewing, Will is remembering, and experiencing. Never before in their brief acquaintance has Hannibal felt more intertwined with the man. Crackling connections like neural impulses travel between them, invisible, but Hannibal watches Will twitch and shudder under their lash, and the bounds of his pleasure expand and soar.

"I've got two teams on this, and the lab is putting in double time," Crawford says. "Make no mistake about it. We _will_ get our man-at this point, dead or alive. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That is all for now."

Following the briefing, Will moves to Hannibal's side. "I'm presenting on the case to a group of students in about an hour," he says. "You don't have to stick around. Beverly can give me a ride back to my place." He indicates the dark-haired woman in the corner.

Hannibal nods. "I owe you another visit. I'll have your clothes laundered, and bring them when I come." He turns.

"Hannibal," Will says. "Thank you again."

Hannibal smiles and inclines his head.

Near the door, he hears his name once again.

"Dr. Lecter." Jack Crawford approaches, puts one enormous palm on Hannibal's bicep. The BAU chief smells of cigar, faint enough not to have been smoked today, but certainly in this same suit.

"Agent Crawford."

"Any thoughts?"

"None that I imagine your team has not already entertained," Hannibal says. "It is quite an interesting case. No pattern to speak of, no gender or race preference, no identifiable _modus operandi_."

"Atypical in every way," Crawford says.

"I'm afraid I my patients are much more frequently depressed, or bipolar," Hannibal says, "far below the scope of psychiatric disturbance with which your unit deals. Still, I would be glad to offer what help I can."

The hand tightens a fraction on Hannibal's arm. "The most helpful thing you can do for me is keep an eye on Will Graham," Crawford says. "A case like this puts someone with Will's...unique abilities in a difficult situation."

"I'm certain that Will knows his limits. Whether he is pushed beyond them entirely depends on outside forces."

This earns Hannibal a frown.

"Still," Hannibal says, "I consider Will a friend, and his welfare means a good deal to me. I hope that is a reassurance."

Looking over at Will, he sees the interaction has not gone unnoticed. Crawford follows Hannibal's sight line, and Will drops his eyes out of habit, ducking his head and scratching at his hair. Crawford casts him as fragile, volatile, and Will seems content for the moment to be seen as such. It is a subtle bit of manipulation that pleases Hannibal.

Crawford gives Hannibal a nod, and his hand drops back to his side.

Hannibal waits until he is a good way down the hall before removing his pocket square and brushing at the spot where Crawford touched his suit jacket.

Bearing a small bundle of clean clothes as well as a pair of bento boxes containing cubed ahi tuna, slivered cucumber, and plum sauce with Swedish blodplättar-blood pancakes, the ongoing contribution of Jason Markwell to culinary sublimation-substituted for the traditional rice wraps, Hannibal makes the long drive down to Wolf Trap a couple of weeks later. The man who answers the door is a shade of Will Graham, a ghoul. His cheeks are hollow, covered with patches of beard growth. Pendulous shadows fall below his eyes, and he sweats despite the frigid weather, shining beads emerging at the line where sallow skin meets greasy hair.

"Have you been eating, Will?" Hannibal asks. "I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried about you."

"Not much," Will admits.

"It's a good thing I've brought food, then," says Hannibal. The sick-sweet odor is stronger now, and haloes Will in thick, red waves. "Any more nightmares?"

"Sometimes," Will says, and Hannibal sees he is holding back.

He places the bundle of clothes on a chair. The single article that is missing, very much by intent, is the t-shirt that Will wore beneath his clothes as Hannibal drove him back to his home in Baltimore. It remains, unwashed, in Hannibal's possession. The bento boxes he deposits on the cluttered kitchen table and walks over to Will, who tries to dodge his hands.

"Please," Hannibal says.

"I'm fine."

"Far from it." Will's skin seeps like unfired clay underneath his fingertips. The smell of sickness is an assault. "You're clammy, but you don't seem to have a fever." This is a lie.

"I feel like my head is on fire," Will says. "A blue fire, almost cold. Everything looks blue."

"You need to sleep."

"I can't. Nobody is listening to me."

"What do you mean?"

"There's another body," Will says.

It comes as a revelation to Hannibal, as well. He has taken no one since Markwell. "Is that so?"

"A man, an older man. They found him near the West Virginia border. His leg was caught in a bear trap, and his throat was cut," Will says. "They're trying to pin it on the Ripper. But I know-I _know_ it's not him."

"Tell me how. What is it in the design, Will, that is wrong?"

Will sits at the table, clutching his head. "The bear trap." The answer is muffled, his voice directed toward his knees. "It's a crude tool. Too crude. The Ripper-he would consider it, well, inelegant. It's savage, yes. But not his brand of savage. There's no direction, no control. The Ripper is _always_ in control."

Will raises his head. His eyes are glazed, but not from the fever. Hannibal watches him in the act of picking out discrepancies between the crime scene he sees, and the scenes he knows by heart.

"And the wound-the fatal cut to the throat," Will continues. "Made with something serrated. And blunt. The wound track was a mess, the skin was shredded. The Ripper is precise. I have a feeling, unless it was a weapon of convenience, it would almost offend him."

"But Jack Crawford believes it's the Ripper," Hannibal says.

"He's inclined to believe me," says Will. "I think he just wants it to be the Ripper. Wants us to be close."

"I think you're closer than you believe you are."

Will's response is a groan.

"Let's get some food in you," Hannibal says.

Under Hannibal's watchful eye, Will at least chokes down half of the contents of his bento box. A little color returns to his wan complexion. Hannibal leads him to the couch, where he collapses, his forearm wrapped in a stained sleeve and covering his eyes.

"Sleep a while, now."

"Every time I close my eyes I see him," Will says.

"The man in the bear trap?" Hannibal asks.

"The stag."

"What does he do?"

"He just stands there, watching," Will says. "Always watching."

"I hope at some point he tells you what he wants to say," Hannibal says.

"For now he's sure not talking." Will's laugh sounds hopeless and spent.

"He may yet," Hannibal says. "In many ancient traditions, the stag was viewed as a messenger for the supernatural. The Scythians of central Asia believed they guided the souls of the dead to the underworld. In Shinto, the indigenous religion of the Japanese islands, stags were said to relay messages between the gods. Heavenly couriers, of sorts."

Hannibal looks down at Will, whose arm is still thrown over his eyes. He breathes heavily through his nose.

"The buck, or hart, is a life-giver in the Norse tradition," Hannibal continues. "It was told that a great stag, named Eikthyrnir, or 'The Oak-Thorned,' stood over the father god Odin's hall in Valhalla. His antlers shed drops of water into the spring from which all the world's rivers flow. A particular legend surrounding the animal in classical society was somewhat more savage, but it was, after all, a time when savagery was a rule of the universe, rather than an exception to it. The cautionary tale of Actaeon demonstrates the perils of indulging in the forbidden, much as the Eden legend of the Hebrews does. Actaeon was a hunter-strong and swift and beautiful, but very bold, and very proud. As the story goes, he was hunting in the woods when he happened upon the goddess Artemis bathing in the river. She was the goddess of the moon, and also of the hunt, but instead of turning his back in reverence and shame, Actaeon hid behind a tree to look on her moon-pale, naked skin. The goddess saw him, and in her wrath, she transformed him into a stag, which her hounds then tore to pieces. And the Greeks believed his punishment just, not only for the sin of gazing on the forbidden, but for his transgression in presuming himself the equal of a superior hunter."

Will's mouth has gone slack as Hannibal speaks, and soon he is asleep. Hannibal shucks his suit jacket, rolls up his shirtsleeves, and sets to cleaning Will's modest kitchen. One or two curious dogs turn into a crowd around him as he works, and the expectant whining leads him to believe they have not yet been fed. Amid their low cries, Hannibal almost fails to hear the moan from the adjoining room. He leaves the dogs to their abrogated canine wondering.

A damp patch has appeared on Will's shirt as sweat pools below his sternum. He clenches his teeth, pushing out breaths between them, droplets of saliva gathering on his lips. Hannibal reaches a hand toward him, and Will hisses as if scalded.

His legs tense, and his hips rise, and Hannibal sees the insistent outline of an erection. It pushes the waistband of his unbelted trousers upward, straining the fasteners. The heavy scent of arousal, twined with Will's suffering sweetness, reaches Hannibal's nose, colors his palate like dark ink in water.

Will's muscles seem to give out all at once, and he lays panting again, limbs thrown in engaging disarray.

"Ha," he says, "I-" The nonsense syllables of sleep.

The pacing of the perturbed dogs on the kitchen linoleum clatters like rainfall.

"Hannibal," Will says.

Hannibal watches, leans in, but Will does not wake.


	4. The Horned God

Over the next few days, Hannibal scans the news outlets. He has come to accept, even foretaste, the peaks and valleys of Will's extreme susceptibility to circumstance. He is not merely buffeted by season, he is season incarnate. His competency is solid and cool, but when he flames into full summer he is volatile, reborn a new thing from thought to thought in the warp and weft of need and fury.

Hannibal's foresight is close to preternatural, but only because he directs contingency to display all possible outcomes before him. The very fact of Will Graham is a vivisection of his method, by which pure chance bleeds into probability. By his existence alone, Will changes Hannibal's design. If he could feel fear, he might be terrified. If he could be exhilarated, his heart might race. But, Hannibal being Hannibal, he is curious. And he _desires_.

Perhaps true to recent form, he comes upon the story by happenstance, on a loathsome website called .

The headline reads, "Ripper's Trail Leads to Very Dead End." Outside of the distasteful attempt at clever wordplay, the article is rather informative. The author, one Freddie Lounds, was at least astute enough to take note of the unusual FBI presence surrounding the investigation into the man found in the bear trap, and deduce that it was related to an ongoing investigation.

The victim, Jonah MacRae, as it turns out, had a long-standing land dispute with his neighbors, and had taken it upon himself to escalate the dispute to vandalism and theft. Apparently, the neighboring family's youngest son had broken under light interrogation and confessed to having taken part in MacRae's murder. A simple grudge killing.

Hannibal dashes off an anonymous letter to the _Sun_, Baltimore's leading newspaper, and the _Washington Post_, decrying the waste of federal funds and manpower in chasing false leads while the Ripper is still at large. He is careful to word it in the most banal terms possible, putting across plebeian indignation while serving dear Jack Crawford a well-deserved dose of humility.

It is not that night, but the night afterward that his doorbell sounds well after dusk. It puts him in mind of the night Bedelia came to confront him, but Hannibal does not believe in coincidence as it applies to him. He knows exactly who stands outside his door.

Will Graham, face livid and eyelids heavy, supports himself with one hand on the doorframe. The other is raised toward the door, less in greeting than in supplication. The heat of his body is so profound that his sweat-soaked hair releases steam into the frigid blackness beyond his head. The front of his shirt is stippled with dark blotches-entirely too dark to be perspiration-that show red when Hannibal draws him into the entry hall and shuts the door.

"I'm-" Will begins.

"Don't speak," Hannibal says. "Come with me. Quickly."

He leads the stumbling man through his sitting room and into the rear hallway, straight to the master bath suite. Will stands, swaying, by the door. He appears blurred, overwritten as he is with the scrawl of confusion and agony. The flame dances over him as he wilts within it, a shadowplay inverted, and Hannibal is entranced.

Will's knees give out, then, and he collapses onto the tile in a sitting position. Hannibal opens the tap and holds his hand beneath the flow, warm but not hot. It will serve both to cool the fever and to clean Will's wounds.

Amid the water's white noise, he sheds his waistcoat and pulls off Will's boots and trousers. The man barely grimaces as Hannibal peels the shirt away from the still-seeping gouges on his chest and works it over his head.

Will is a sorry sight, thin and pale in his socks and underwear, bent almost double over the boiling in his gut so the causeway of his spine emerges stark from the flesh of his back. Hannibal places his fingers into the divots between the thoracic vertebrae and guides Will toward the shower.

He cries out when the water meets his skin, and struggles against a stream that no doubt seems much colder than it is. His strength is gone, however, and Hannibal easily holds him, arms pinned to his sides, inside the cradle of the water. His fine, tailored shirt and trousers soak through and grow heavy, and still he stands, pulling Will against his chest, soothing his agitation.

When he turns the shower off, he hears Will's teeth knocking. Still wringing wet himself, Hannibal divests an uncomplaining Will of his boxers and socks, and wraps him in his own Egyptian cotton bathrobe. It will be ruined, of course, like his drenched clothes, but by Will's blood from the still-oozing lacerations.

Slinging a towel over his arm, he leads Will into the bedroom, throwing back the coverlet and draping the towel over his pillow. Only a finite number of Hannibal's possessions will be spoiled tonight. Will's convulsive shriveling when his body hits the mattress curls him inward, fetal, the involuntary contraction of a corpse on fire. He does, indeed, burn, but the immolation is slow and internal.

Hannibal pulls the coverlet over Will's bare feet, then moves away to quietly strip and re-dress. From the bathroom, he retrieves rubbing alcohol, ointment, and gauze.

"Will, I want you to turn over. I need to examine your injuries."

"Too cold," Will says. "Just-just let me warm up."

"Let me dress them, then I'll cover you again, and you can sleep."

This spurs Will to turn onto his back. His eyes are wide, aimed toward the ceiling but seeing nothing. "No. No sleep."

Hannibal parts the thick cotton of the bathrobe, down to the crest of Will's hipbones.

"Christ," says Will. The word is a breath sacrificed to the cool air that encroaches on his bare skin.

The robe is of fine enough weave that it leaves no fibers in the wounds that mark the pale chest in a starburst pattern. On closer inspection, they are superficial, and Hannibal understands what has happened. He takes a moment to unfurl the hand clenched at Will's side, sees the blood and tissue that remains below the ragged fingernails. At some point that night, whether knowingly or not, Will had clawed at his own skin until he bled.

"This will hurt a bit," says Hannibal, and presses a gauze pad soaked in pungent alcohol to the bloodied flesh.

"Fuck," Will says, short and sharp, but only grits his teeth against the burn as Hannibal continues.

"What happened, Will?"

"Night-_ow_. Nightmare. I don't remember doing it. I woke up like this."

"I'm rather impressed you made the drive to my house without killing yourself," says Hannibal. "You could have called me. I would have come right away."

Will blinks, breathes in deep as the sting of the alcohol subsides. "I know. I wasn't thinking. I just had to get out of there. It was in my house. _Inside my house_."

"The stag?"

"Yes. Standing over my bed. Jesus, I could feel its breath on my arm. It was so cold, unbelievably cold. I tried to cover my eyes. But then it wasn't a stag anymore. It was a man. A man with horns. He was in shadow wherever he walked in the room, like he brought the shadow with him."

"Did the man say anything?" Hannibal asks, smoothing the thick antibiotic ointment over the abraded skin with cool fingertips.

"Nothing," Will said, surrender coloring the admission. "He stood, and he watched. I tried to sit up, I tried to see his face. When I did, he put his hands into his chest, just pushed them in, and opened it up, god, like a cabinet. Like his ribs were doors. I saw inside, and I saw his heart was on fire. On fire, and still beating while it burned. I thought it would be horrible, terrifying, but it was beautiful. And so bright. I couldn't look away. And even though it was bright, I still couldn't see his face."

"You woke up soon after?"

"Yeah. Bleeding, and burning up, too."

Hannibal presses clean gauze onto Will's chest. It is a light dressing, but will do for the time being.

"Is it me?" asks Will, helpless, as Hannibal folds the robe over his work, closing the wounds from view. "Is it inside me? I tried to get it out."

"It is," Hannibal says, "and it isn't. The stag, he is the man you seek, and he is seeking you, as well. He may not know you, but he feels as if he does. Just as you know him. You are close to one another, so close, and you bleed into one another."

"The Ripper?"

Hannibal nods. "Do you know of the horned god, Cernunnos? It is an obscure legend, most of it lost to time, unfortunately."

Will shakes his head.

"Cernunnos was a deity of ancient Gaul-what is now France and Spain. He is represented in carvings as a man wearing a stag's antlers. The stag was among his familiars, as were the snake, the goat, and the boar, befitting a god of the hunt. He was also a god of change, of death and regeneration. To some, also a god of fertility. A personification of the seasons. According to a few traditions, Cernunnos is born at the winter solstice each year, he marries the mother goddess at the onset of spring, and dies after the summer harvest. He then goes to serve as lord of the underworld until his rebirth at the next solstice. Unfortunately in my opinion, his cult did not make it across the channel, and he died a final death when Gaul was Christianized."

"What does that have to do with the Ripper?"

Hannibal smiles. "He has cycles, too, Will. Inevitable. Inexorable."

"No," says Will. "The Ripper chooses who and when he kills. There's no pattern, no cycle, nothing the same from one body to the next."

"He chooses, yes. But he chooses because he is compelled to do so by the nature of what he is. There will always be those who choose, and those for whom choices are made."

"Are you suggesting the Ripper is dictating my path?" Will asks.

"I only suggest that perhaps you haven't thought about what you will do should you ever catch him," says Hannibal.

Will pauses only a second, but it is enough for Hannibal to see. "Maybe go build boats on the bayou. Teach, maybe. Burn up, fade away. It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter?"

"Everything will be open."

"Everything is already open," says Hannibal, placing his hand briefly on Will's forehead. "Rest now."

This time Hannibal wakes first. He has spent what little of the night he slept in the library's armchair, waiting and listening. Reflecting on the fact that he grows more discontented with the simple observation of Will's response to his offerings. They have grown unsatisfactory, paling as Will has paled, and now merely quaver in half-reflection over the surface of his inquisitiveness. With more direct intervention, of course, comes greater risk, but Will's increasingly compromised condition could very well serve to negate it. By all appearances, Hannibal is not a gambling man, but he does crave novelty in nearly the same measure as he craves luxury.

And his desire for the former has proved far more difficult to sate than his need for the latter. Amid the constructions, the machinations fractal in their complexity, a rigid structure has begun to emerge. He is frosting over, slowing by immeasurably small increments, and so thirsts for a thaw, a revenant flexibility.

Cautiously, though. Cautiously. Hannibal is not fool enough to believe that straining something so long unbent could not end in fracture.

This he thinks as he applies gentle heat to a saucepan of butter and egg for hollandaise. Into porous crumpets he will tuck a nest made of delicate shreds of Jason Markwell's _extensor carpi ulnaris_ (and that will be the last of the gifts from the boy's body, the ascendancy made complete), to be crowned with a golden egg yolk.

As the fragrant meat browns in sweet cream artisan butter, Will Graham walks into the kitchen, still wearing Hannibal's bathrobe.

"Do you ever sleep?" Will asks him.

Hannibal laughs. "A necessary evil, I think, for people like you and me. Did you dream again?"

"No. This place is like a safe house. My nightmares can't get in." The smile Will gives, not to Hannibal exactly but in the direction of the rack of copper-clad stock pots by the wall, is genuine for all its evasiveness.

"Good. And here, you know that a meal will always be waiting for you when you wake. Food is far more pleasurable than sleep, don't you find?"

"Absolutely."

They sit down to the eggs benedict and strong, sweet Earl Grey tea. The residual aroma that accompanies the inflammation on Will's brain twines in unexpected harmony the rich bergamot. Hannibal breathes both in, inviting the blend across his palate. Mixing this smell with the taste of Jason Markwell is immensely satisfying.

"So, what do you think the heart means? The heart on fire," Will says as he blots hollandaise from his lips. They retain a sheen of fat from the meat.

"Apart from a manifestation of fever, I couldn't say," Hannibal says, and collects Will's dish and his own.

"I mean, my life sort of revolves around the Ripper right now," Will says, "but is this telling me that I'm somehow...emotionally attached to him?"

Hannibal's laugh startles him, he can tell. "Despite what the ancient Egyptians felt, the seat of the soul, as it were, is not the heart. Did you know, during the mummification ritual, it was given pride of place? While the liver and lights were removed and placed in canopic jars, the heart was left inside the body. The brain, that undignified thing, was diced and drawn out through the nostrils."

His mirth leaves Will confounded. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm sorry, dear Will. Your question. I meant no offense. I only meant to say that the core of a man is not at his heart. A romantic notion for peasants and poetry. It could be that your subconscious is playing on that trope, but I think you know better."

Will's brow furrows. He stands, then paces. "I don't understand."

"Calm yourself, Will. There is nothing to understand. If I were to interpret your dream, I would say the flaming heart is of no concern, a nonentity. It contains nothing, so who should care if it burns? What makes a man, what motivates him, is his mind. And that the horned man's face was still in shadow suggests only that, even though he seems bared to you, you do not yet know his mind."

"I don't know my own mind," Will asks, restless again. "I don't trust it. I can't even tell if what I'm seeing is true or a lie."

"Lies can be equally enlightening," Hannibal says. "If not more so. What are literature, music, if not lies to the senses and to the brain, convincing them to quell their restlessness for a while?"

"This isn't quelling," Will says. "It's stirring things up. I don't know what's real." He stumbles, crushing the heel of his hand to his temple as if trying to knock the invasive images from his skull.

Hannibal moves to his side, supports him, sure hands on wrist and waist.

"Help me," Will says. His lids flutter, eyes rolling and jerking below them.

"Will, listen to my voice." Hannibal says. He places one hand on the fevered cheek, where a droplet of sweat from Will's hairline falls and shudders atop Hannibal's fingertip. He smells both of illness and of flesh, cooked to perfection. Then Will's hands are on his biceps and his mouth is up against Hannibal's own.

Hannibal braces the man's face between firm hands, pushes him away so there is barely a breath of space between them. "Will, do you want to stop?"

"Stop," Will says. Then, "Stop talking."

And Hannibal pulls him forward again, and upward, bends even as he draws Will to him to lean in, to taste that mouth that brims with corruption and sustenance alike. With fingertips dug hard into his jaw, he shoves Will's head to one side with such force that he hears the teeth rattle behind the flesh of the other man's cheek, and sucks the sweat from Will's neck, drinks it in where it pools in the hollow above his collarbone.

The hands tighten on his arms, but the only sound he hears from Will is the rolling of his breath. Hannibal yanks at the robe where it is belted around Will's waist, and hears fabric tear. It is destroyed anyway, a nuisance, an afterthought. One square of gauze peels away from Will's chest and falls to the tile.

Hannibal's nose fills with the scent of the greasy medicine, and within that smell, Will's blood, scraped up to blooming on his skin. Sickness, sleep, blood, and sex-all of it grows stronger by exponential leaps with proximity to Will's groin. Hannibal's knee impacts the kitchen floor next to the discarded gauze. He hardly notices the reverberation, a sine wave lost in muscle and bone.

He no longer feels the pressure of hands; Will is pulling the robe from his shoulders with frantic motion, as if it is in flames. Taste, scent, and pressure concatenate and merge, the design solidifies, as Hannibal uses cool fingers to guide Will's rigid cock into his mouth.

The flesh is warm beyond arousal, beyond exertion-the fever expressing itself and Will only a conduit, passivity embodied. Hannibal's own erection grows painful at the thought of of tasting that fever, subsuming the illness and making it his own.

That which he consumes he controls, and makes transcendent.

Above his head, a single wordless sound falls from Will's lips. Hannibal presses his thumbs, one each against the most prominent ridge of Will's hip bones, crushing the flesh to bruising, a counterpoint to pleasure. He would have the experience drawn out awhile, unabridged by Will's helplessness.

"Hannibal." Soft and strained, from above.

Will braces himself against the edge of the breakfast table; at its joints the wood creaks under the weight of his compliance.

"Please," he says. Likely unconscious of the compulsion, Will has begun to move, trying tentative thrusts like entreaties for greater motion.

Hannibal shoves his hips back against the lip of the table, where he knows the wood will bite, will scatter Will's focus for a few more hoarded seconds. The taste of him is riotous, drawing all synapses toward the processing of distinct flavor notes that shift from second to second on Hannibal's tongue. Consumed in consumption.

"I-oh, fuck."

There is no coaxing Will back from the precipice now. His legs shudder, muscles knotting and unknotting in sequential play.

"Hannibal," he says, voice high and tight in a straining throat, "I'm going to come."

Hannibal feels it a moment before he tastes it, and the disconnect is sufficient to compromise his precision. Instead of a smooth slide into his throat, his mouth is awash with a horde of coruscating flavors-the bitter and savory, all shot through with the syrupy distillation of Will's peculiar malady. He must move one hand to grip his own erection through the cloth of his trousers, tamp his sudden need, for the moment, to an endurable level.

He swallows, and rises, brushing the back of his hand across his lips. When Will opens his eyes, the single second's breadth over which they meet Hannibal's should be more than time enough to read the inevitability there.


	5. Bridegroom

Will does not emerge from his pleasured haze so much as pass from one state of blinded euphoria to the next, a plane where uncertainty and even trepidation are sweet.

This is far from the first time that Hannibal has known hunger of any sort, but he very rarely allows it free rein over his demeanor. Now, however, it is essential that Will see it, and understand well that evasion is not an option.

"Will," he says, earning another second of eye contact.

"Do you want to-" Will stops, but his meaning is taken.

"I do."

"Good," says Will. "I do, too. I want-I mean, I want to do whatever you want. I don't know where to start."

"I'll show you," Hannibal says, and extends his hand.

Will looks even more slight against the expanse of Hannibal's bed as he stands by its edge. Hannibal can tell he is trying to pull himself upright, trying not to fidget, to cover himself, but also that he has had little experience with being seen unclothed. The quiet realization comes to Hannibal that Will is infinitely more comfortable being emotionally naked than physically so, and he lets a smile touch his lips as he removes his cufflinks and sets them aside.

Will has seen that smile, and he tries to mirror it.

As Hannibal undresses himself, it is matter-of-fact. He wants no fumbling or delay. Though he has no real desire to force Will to stand untouched for a protracted time, he feels he must be deliberate in his communication of intent. As he eases his silk briefs down and away, the first flicker of hesitation crosses Will's face.

Hannibal goes to Will, strokes his forehead, his lips, the ridge of his sunken cheek, bestowing only fingertip contact, for now. Absent anything to do, Will moves in for another kiss, and Hannibal allows it for a brief time, maintaining with guiding hands on Will's shoulders the measured distance between their bodies.

Will looks down into that space, and says, "Can I?"

Hannibal nods, benevolent.

The touch, as he expected, is questing, uncertain. Will's palm on his cock is damp. It satisfies for the moment, but will soon be insufficient.

"It doesn't have to hurt," he says, pressing his lips to the jut of Will's mandible, the wiry hair there pricking at his skin. "I'll open you up." Hannibal pushes himself by millimeters into Will's hand, as punctuation.

"I want it," Will says. He does not blush or stammer, and this pleases Hannibal. Of all limiting factors, inexperience is far easier to override than fear or shame. "I just need you to keep touching me."

"I will give you what you want." Hannibal impels him backward, letting Will's knees give way at the edge of the mattress as they had threatened to do in the kitchen. Hannibal spreads his hand across Will's chest, pushing him backward, fingers on instinct flicking out a melody on the long bars of Will's ribs.

"Wait," he says.

Hannibal shakes his head. "No waiting."

"I mean, I'd rather be-" Now Will's speech is halting, embarrassed. "If I have to look at your face, I won't be able to..."

"Ah," says Hannibal. "Of course." He steps back, allowing Will to turn over, place his knees just at the lip of the bed. Hannibal moves easily between them. Will looks away, toward the curtained window, but his slow exhalation when Hannibal touches his skin projects contentment, willingness.

The aromas that rise with Will now open to him are sharper, stranger. He leans in to take their fullness, parse the component notes. Then he tastes, using his full mouth, allowing flavor and scent to commingle.

"Oh, my god," he hears Will say.

The taste of human skin, intact, is entirely unlike the taste of human flesh, and the taste of sex is comparable to neither. Though the latter, Hannibal finds, in both men and women, has by far the most mutable bouquet. Not always pleasant, _per se_, but always interesting. The taste of Will's cock prior to orgasm differs from its taste afterward. The flavor shifts as Hannibal tongues along the skin of Will's testicles, his perineum, his anus, and grows heady as he uses two fingers to open him and taste inside. All of it is tainted sick-sweet, as even through periods of lucidity, the swelling on Will's brain has yet to abate.

These things Hannibal now knows, and is edified.

He experiments with the angle of his fingers, the depth, glide, and catch. None of it does Will seem to find objectionable; quite the opposite, in fact.

Hannibal predicts, correctly, the constriction in Will's muscles as he removes his fingers. It is anticipatory, but will only hinder the process. Though meticulous and exploratory, the preparation has brought about an end to Hannibal's patience. He is hard and craving release.

"Relax," he says. The soft command, he sees, has a positive effect on Will.

There is a bottle of lubricant neatly wrapped in a cloth inside the bureau drawer, and Hannibal retrieves it. He imagines subjecting a partner to the sudden coolness of a drizzle of the stuff to be impolite, so he bears the discomfort himself, using the cloth to clean his hands afterward.

Under those hands, he feels Will fight the impulse to tense. "Good," he says, and begins, slowly, to push his cock inside.

He finds no sound of complaint, no attempt to evade. Even in the presence of some discomfort, it seems that Will is anxious to prove Hannibal true to his word.

"Yes," he says. "Let me in."

Tension drains away, fluid and quick, and Hannibal slips in flush. The sigh Will gives is one of pleasure, uncompromised, as well as an indication that Hannibal is now free to pursue his own.

And thus it is as it ever was-their connection-not at an apex but falling along a charted line of progression, a certainty. It is pure, frictionless logic.

Hannibal is not brutal, he is exacting. This Will is sure to know, even if he cannot articulate it outside of the context of the Chesapeake Ripper. And when Hannibal thrusts into him, he need not articulate anything, only be content with the assurance he is given. So even as Hannibal snaps his hips in staccato, coaxing vulgar sounds from between them as flesh impacts flesh, he delivers with great attention, feeling Will's recognition of it.

Hannibal closes his eyes, scents the air.

"Touch me?" Will says, in the same need-constricted voice.

Hannibal obliges, finding him hard once again.

"Please," says Will, asking in heedless abandon for what he is already given.

This time, Hannibal feels rather than hears the approach of Will's orgasm. Under his touch, Will gives a groan from between clenched teeth and spills onto the bedcovers. Fighting to regain his breath, still he speaks Hannibal's name.

And Hannibal comes, letting the rare sensation pull through him. During those seconds, the strand of his connection to scent and to taste becomes tenuous, the only point at which Hannibal feels remotely ungrounded.

"Fill me up," Will says, lowering his cheek to the cool sheet.

Both men stand in the shower, later-both silent-perhaps an echo of the attempt to quash Will's fever. Hannibal with his arms still around Will, and Will with his head still lolling through the spray, but he has, for the time being, exchanged one fever for another. An undetected sleight of hand. Hannibal moves through and around him, and he is both aware and oblivious.

In the morning, Hannibal wakes to the scrape of beard against his abdomen, a flaccid cock soon encouraged to hardness with Will's attention. He chokes, gags a little, but the effort is earnest. Indulgent, Hannibal relents, and comes inside Will's mouth.

Will sips coffee as Hannibal cooks, and there is no need to speak.

"I wonder," Hannibal says, "If you won't join me for dinner later this week."

Smiling, Will stares into his cup. "Of course."

"Excellent," says Hannibal. "Then I'll need to do some shopping."

The search proves to be an exercise in frustration for Hannibal, who find he is compelled to balance the fact of immediate need with his desire for unique suitability. This gift to Will Graham must not only invite now, but extend. Coyness has also lost its utility; he is free to be overt. He wants Will to see, and to know, knowing himself that whatever explanation is conjured by Will's suffering mind will exist only there, unable to be extracted and projected beyond its confines. Taking such care to describe this circle around Will, to orbit a body exalted but also trapped, his nature dictates that he must set it alight, even if it separates them.

He has insinuated himself inside Will as Hannibal Lecter, but he does not forget that the Ripper set his claim there first.

As necessity and action can create fortune, so it does as Hannibal watches the man wearing the bandana underneath a baseball cap. As Hannibal exits the barber and apothecary on Charles Street, which he frequents, he sees the man walking on the opposite sidewalk. He keeps pace with a heavily pregnant woman who walks a few steps ahead of Hannibal, fighting the pedestrian flow, the woman silent and the man showering her with obscenities, an uncomfortable volley over the evening traffic. When the woman turns to walk down a short alley, it enrages the man, who runs between cars against the sound of howling tires. Hannibal notes the row home on the next street that they both enter, one after the other. Though he does not care to stay and listen, much later when the man re-emerges, alone, to traverse the alley, Hannibal is waiting.

In his garage, the Bentley parked one space over, its waxed surfaces reflecting the waves of plastic sheeting in the low light, Hannibal dabs at the froth of spittle that appears in the corners of the man's mouth, which he has pinned shut with a few roofing nails driven through the jaw and well into the maxillar process. The man groans each time he swallows a fragment of one of his teeth, which seems a curious and peripheral complaint, as Hannibal has snipped out the plate of his sternum with a good pair of pruning shears and is prodding his stuttering heart.

The muscle gives out shortly afterward, and Hannibal removes it, setting it aside in a dish.

Though it is his preferred method of preparation, Hannibal decides it is too bold to braise the heart whole, so he settles for _anticuchos_ with aji panca over blanched plantain, and a red cabbage chutney.

"This is phenomenal," Will says, prying a cube of the tender muscle from its palm skewer and adding a forkful of chutney. "Where does this even come from?"

Hannibal watches him chew, pleased. "The recipe is Peruvian. With a little of my own improvisation, of course."

"Open a restaurant," says Will. "I'm serious."

"It's much more satisfying watching you enjoy it. Besides, I could never keep up with demand."

Will laughs. The evening's tenor is an easy one, steeped in comfort that is deepened with the addition of two bottles of R. López de Heredia Reserva Especial Rioja.

"Hey," Will says, looking at the gilt-framed Labille-Guiard painting (an original, the piece of criminally low value on the market despite its having emerged from the Académie Royale, because the painter had been female), "I hope this isn't too presumptuous, but I was hoping I could stay here tonight."

"I would expect nothing less," Hannibal says.

"I need a vacation from nightmares."

Hannibal frowns. "They haven't subsided?"

Will shakes his head. The candelight for a moment makes his face cadaverous. "They come and go. But they never completely stop."

"Have you thought about a brain scan? An FMRI, perhaps? It may tell you if the symptoms have a physical cause."

"What, like a tumor?"

"No, no," Hannibal says. "Nothing like that. But you've been in a rapidly fluctuating febrile state. It is untenable for long; the brain cannot withstand it indefinitely without some damage. For now, they are fever dreams, but you may find the content of your dreams bleeding into reality without your consent."

"Maybe I just need to spend more time with you," Will says. "You make it go away."

Hannibal smiles and shakes his head.

Later, when he takes Will to bed, Will places a hand on his chest, and tells him, "I'd like to try, you know, facing you. It may take a long time, but-"

"If you'd like. It's not my aim to make you uncomfortable."

"You don't. It's me, entirely," says Will. "But I want to see. I can't look away forever. I want to watch you."

Even with that profession, Will places his hands over his eyes, breathing hard, as Hannibal sucks him for a long while, bringing him to the edge but never over. He skims his lips through the trails of sweat that have emerged on Will's torso, brings the taste to Will's mouth. He pulls the hands away, each in turn, as he reaches between their bodies to slide a finger inside.

Will's eyes are still closed, but they open, leaping with momentary confusion, as Hannibal breaks contact to anoint his cock with lubricant. When he settles again between Will's legs, the lids descend, but at least Hannibal can observe the subtle changes in expression-as numerous and transitory as those in taste or scent-as he enters.

For now, Hannibal is content with shallow thrusts, sitting back on his heels and watching familiar, pale skin acquire its red stain, but at the same time depriving Will of contact.

Will is very hard indeed. "Fuck me," he says, voice low.

"Hush," says Hannibal, and keeps his pace steady.

When at last he lowers his weight, bracing himself with elbows at either side of Will's head, Will fights to turn his face away and finds he cannot.

"Please." This is Will's refrain. He asks for things he could not possibly articulate, because they are unnameable in his head.

"Will," Hannibal says, breathing the word onto the man's lips.

The shock of it opens Will's eyes, and written on his face is surprise, pleasure...and then, something else. A shadow's shadow. Hannibal grits his teeth and comes, and in a bare second Will is lost, as well.

Hannibal slides away, ignoring the persisting throb in his groin as his orgasm subsides, searching Will's face for that penumbra. Will opens his eyes again, and smiles, and at least to him the memory is lost.

Cold and movement wake Hannibal. Sour fever-sweat pervades the air around the bed, and the hand resting on Will's belly comes away wet. Amplified in the silence, Hannibal can hear the bone-on-bone squeal of teeth grinding.

"Will." He shakes him once. Twice.

Will's eyes open; again he is seeing something other than what is before him. The fear makes his breath catch, and then the vision is gone, and air floods his lungs again.

"Jesus Christ," he says.

"Will. It's Hannibal. I'm here."

When Will's head turns, his brow furrows, and the naked disappointment on his face is childlike. As though he fully expected Hannibal's presence to keep the night terrors at bay.

"Let me get you a cloth," Hannibal says.

"No. Stay. Please."

Hannibal's nostrils flare as Will breathes, reeking of animal fear.

"I ate it."

"What did you eat, Will?"

"The heart," he says. "The flaming heart. He handed it to me, and I ate it. And I caught fire, and kept eating as my face burned away. Oh, god."

"It was just a dream."

"I could feel the fire, feel my skin cracking and peeling. But the heart tasted like metal. Like cold metal."

Will's spine arches, his startle so ferocious it is convulsive, as a shrill tone sounds close to his head. Hannibal sees green light flickering on the bedside table. Will's phone.

He reaches for it. The display reads, "Jack Crawford." He pushes the button that ignores the call.

"Fuck," Will says, digging at his eyes with the ball of his hand. "My phone."

"You're in no state to answer."

"Who was it?"

"Jack Crawford."

"Shit." Will sits up, a runnel of sweat breaking from his hairline and sliding down his cheek to shiver just below his chin.

The phone begins to ring again.

"I do not think it's in your best interest to answer that," Hannibal says. "Not tonight. Wait until morning."

"Jack-he only calls me in the middle of the night for one thing.

"Please, Will."

Will shakes his head as if to knock the plea out of his memory, and takes the phone from Hannibal's hand.

"Will Graham." His name, spoken, sounds unfamiliar in Hannibal's ears. He nods, nods again. "I'll meet you out there," he says, and ends the call.

Neither has to speak to understand. Yet Will says, "I need to go."

Hannibal nods.

"I'd like you to come," Will says. "I might need it."

"Consider me already there," says Hannibal.

The body was left in the shadow of an overpass along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. The sodium lights make black blood shine again. The corpse's open eyes are filmed over, but the branches of hemorrhaging from strain and agony still reach into the sclera.

The man's head is not where it should be. Instead, it rests inside the chest cavity in place of lungs and heart-bracketed, cradled by the wings of the opened rib cage.

A cabinet of curiosities, wherein all the knowledge of men now lies.

"Dear god," says Jack Crawford.

The sound of Will's body impacting the earth is loud, even against a bed of wet and rotting leaves. Hannibal thinks for a moment that he has fainted, but his body is far from still; its individual limbs are alive with motion. A spatter of froth erupts from his mouth.

"What the hell is happening to him, Dr. Lecter?" Crawford asks.

Kneeling beside Will's shoulder, Hannibal pushes his flickering eyelids up one at a time. They are leaking, the irises invisible, rolled up to the orbital bone.

"You need to call an ambulance. He is having a seizure."


	6. The Burning Season

For three days as Will burns, Hannibal sits by his bedside, calm, watching the pyre he helped to construct. It is a time of reflection, of self-imposed exile, though he is merely warmed by the killing heat, a proxy.

It is a vision quest of sorts, but there are no signs from the sky, no devils of temptation-only the simultaneous examination of ramifying possibility, endless capillary meandering into an obscured distance marked with subtle but noticeable shifts upon each clicking degree of the kaleidoscope. Probability has been hamstrung, collapsed; it perturbs Hannibal, and, for the first time in the memory of his adult life, excites him.

He is unfettered, and feels both the liberation and strain of new curvature in equal measure.

On the fourth day, when bombardment with a cocktail of antibiotics, antivirals, anti-inflammatories, and anticonvulsants subdues the fever enough for partial lucidity, Will undergoes an MRI scan that uncovers severe left hemispheric encephalitis. Idiopathic, likely autoimmune, news of which as a medical doctor Hannibal receives with acceptance. As the man he is, he welcomes the confirmation with silent grace.

It is on that day, too, that Will awakes, and favors Hannibal with the longest continuous period of unbroken eye contact since their first meeting. It would be disconcerting, as the internal play that Hannibal can read in most other people's eyes he cannot decipher in Will's. But there is a certain acute satisfaction in knowing that those eyes now are opened, that he and Will can look on one another-perhaps not as equals, but with augmented understanding.

Other people, colleagues of Will's have come and gone as Hannibal has kept his vigil. The dark-haired female agent he called Beverly, even Jack Crawford. Will has spoken to none of them, and not only because he is still intubated. He is reserving his first words for Hannibal.

They come near dusk on the fifth day of his hospitalization, hours after the attendant nurse has removed the tube from his throat. Perhaps he thinks to force Hannibal to consider the exact magnitude of the threat he presents. Regardless, it would be a fruitless ploy-all likelihoods have already unfolded before Hannibal in the long hours of his silent watch; any words that will break it have been foreseen.

"You lied to me," Will says. The voice is scratchy with disuse, but cooled by both clarity and animosity.

"Your mind lied to you," Hannibal says. "I have always been truthful."

"Even that's a lie."

"If you think so."

"What about Bedelia? It wasn't a patient, was it? That was a lie. You killed her."

Hannibal nods. "The act had its own veracity."

"Fuck, I'm going to be sick." Will leans and vomits over the side of the bed, great heaving gasps bringing up clear, thick liquid. The smell of bile fills the room.

Hannibal leaves his seat, but Will raises his hand, index finger extended in accusatory warning. "Don't you fucking come near me."

"I'm not going to touch you, Will."

In the bed, viscous strings of fluid clinging to his lips, Will chokes out a laugh. The sound is as helpless as any Hannibal has ever heard. "I thought I was dying," he says. "I thought I _had_ died. And when I woke up, when things were clear again, the first goddamn thing I thought was, 'I want it back. I want the fever back.' I didn't want to look. I didn't want to know. I still don't."

"You have always known," Hannibal says.

"No. _No._ I trusted what you told me. Not what you showed me."

"They were one and the same."

Will shuts his eyes tight, hissing through clenched teeth, and for a moment Hannibal is almost certain he is seizing again, until Will raises his hands to his face, digs livid lines into his flesh that fill immediately with the flush of superficial abrasion.

As an echo of motion long past, Hannibal goes to his side, pulls his hands away. The tears on his cheeks must certainly sting the raw welts rising there. Will goes limp, but when Hannibal releases his wrists, he moves away a fraction of a second too slowly to prevent the fist that flies up from the bedcovers from connecting with his mouth. Hannibal feels his lip split under Will's knuckle, smells the heavy acid tang that is his own blood.

He backs away, removes his handkerchief to dab at the flow. A blossom of bright poppy red adorns his lapel.

"What will you tell Crawford?" Hannibal asks.

"Fuck you." Will is looking not at Hannibal but at the smear of blood on his hand. He scrubs it away from his skin with the starched sheet as if it is corrosive.

"Will."

"Nothing. Nothing and you know it. He's-you're too good. There's no evidence, and there never will be."

"Not apart from that which exists in your mind," Hannibal says.

"My mind," Will says. It sounds like a sob. "Yes, that's what this has all been about, hasn't it? My mind as your laboratory. Your playground. You were just curious. You wanted to see what I would do. Wind him up and watch him go."

"I value your mind, Will. It is singular among all those I have known."

"Stop lying to me!" Will shouts at him. "If you value something, you don't destroy it."

"On the contrary, Will," Hannibal says, his tone gentle. "Sacrifice is one of the highest forms of adoration."

The breath leaves Will's body in a rush, as though he has fallen from a great height.

Hannibal gathers his suit jacket. He pauses at the door. Will is still slumped in the bed, his forehead nearly touching the blanket.

A sorry sight, but Hannibal knows well that it won't be his parting impression of Will Graham.

When Will comes to him upon his release from the hospital, it is as a man transformed. Reborn. He has not merely stepped through flame, but has languished in it, been reduced by it to components from which he can piece together an assembly entirely of his own making. Hannibal recognizes that his lot is to remain unacknowledged as the accelerant to that fire, but the satisfaction-as it is always in his case-lies not in being known but in knowing.

And though Will Graham looks through new eyes, he does not yet see the fullness of the design. The fever left only a single path in its terrible wake. On either side, Will is greeted by landscapes of ash, so he does not look. While the path is both an indicator and an end in itself, Hannibal's own faceted vision bestows on him the knowledge that transformation arises from the periphery. All truths have the same weight, coexist at the same point, but are fractured, scattered, and ranked by what we choose to see and not to see.

Of the possibilities before him, Hannibal must consciously prevent himself from giving undue gravity to the one by which Will's mind is clear enough, unlike Bedelia's was, to fathom all outcomes.

He is dicing a young fennel bulb for _saumon en croûte_ when Will enters his home for the final time.

In spite of the ghastly hospital fare, he can see that Will has regained a bit of weight; his once-lank hair is now fuller and his skin less pallid.

"Hello, Will," says Hannibal, not looking up from his task.

"Hello, Dr. Lecter."

"You're looking well."

Will does not respond.

"Would you like to have a seat?" Hannibal asks. "I was just about to start dinner."

"I don't think so."

Hannibal looks up, finally, the knife he holds poised above the fragrant white flesh of the fennel. "So this is where it ends."

"You tell me, Dr. Lecter," says Will.

"I'd rather have you tell me. Tell me what you see."

"Everything. I see everything," Will says. "I still don't want to look. I'm staring at it, and I want to close my eyes, but I can't. And a very small part, an irrational part of me, almost believes that if I just run away from all of it, go somewhere else, that it would fade. But that's not true, is it? You will always follow me."

Hannibal resumes chopping. "In one way or another, yes."

"I just need you to help me understand," says Will. "The last body. The head in the chest cavity. The mind where the heart should be. It was far from subtle."

"Human constructions rarely are. They employ archetypes, symbols as explanation."

"So you're admitting you're human."

"I am a man, Will, yes."

"No you're not," Will says. "I don't know what you are."

"You do," says Hannibal, pushing aside the parings and chopping the fronds from another bulb. "We are the just the same, Will."

"I'm nothing like you. I don't kill people."

"Don't you? Certainly you have caused people's deaths."

"Who?" Will asks, the pitch of his voice beginning to rise. "Whose deaths have I caused?"

"Marisa Schuur. Jason Markwell. Is not inspiration as good as the deed?" Hannibal cores the bulb, excising the bitter toughness from within.

"No. No! You're just-you're just fucking with my head again," Will begins to pace. "Drawing me in."

"When I did draw you in, Will, at first, tell me: was it unpleasant?"

He stops pacing. Hannibal knows without looking the grimace of extreme concentration that contorts Will's face. He has memorized it.

"No. For a little while-so short I can hardly remember it-it was the best thing in my life."

"But now your mind is clear," Hannibal says, setting up a slow, clean rhythm with the blade.

"Yes, and it's so much worse. So much worse than the fever. When I couldn't trust my mind, it showed me horrors, but they were horrors I could wake up from. Now I know they're real, not just the products of a-a diseased brain."

"Then don't trust your mind, Will."

"You're asking me to do the impossible," Will says. "There's no going back. Will you stop?"

Hannibal continues to chop the fennel. "Stop what?"

"I need you to look at me."

"I don't see what it will accomplish, Will.

"Lecter." Will says, and failing that, "Hannibal. Put the knife down and look at me. _Please_."

Hannibal stops, looks at Will, and sees he has drawn a gun from a shoulder holster. Tears in bifurcated lines cut his cheeks.

"Would it make you feel better to shoot me now?" Hannibal asks.

"I don't want to feel better," Will says. "I want to stop feeling. Stop it all."

Hannibal takes up the knife again, turns back to the bulb of fennel, now lying open to him on the cutting board. "What would you like me to tell you, Will? You yourself said there is no going back. You would only be lying to yourself."

"I called Crawford," Will says. "He's on his way. I told him I could get a confession."

"Such untruths already," says Hannibal.

"Shut up."

"You'll have to kill me, Will. It's the only way to stop it. The only way to stop me," Hannibal says. "Ah, but I forgot. You don't kill people." He pauses in his preparation, looking not at Will but toward the window at the opposite wall, as if addressing an unseen presence. "Either way, I very much doubt the dreams will ever stop. I will always be with you."

The noise Will makes is a low, suffering, almost animal cry, but it is obliterated by a roar that shakes the copper-clad pans on their wall rack. Hannibal feels an impact, his balance gives out, and he falls to the floor. The pain comes a few long seconds later.

Will's shot has shattered his patella; the bloodied suit trousers show a garden of bone splinters when he looks down. The air thickens with the smell of blood and cordite.

Will moves closer, the barrel of the gun now trained on Hannibal's face.

Hannibal struggles to breathe, to dim the white star of agony that consumes his lower body.

"Tell me you did it _to_ me. Tell me I was your toy. Your fucking experiment," Will says, pleading, crying freely now. "Tell me you didn't do it all _for_ me."

"It would be a lie." Hannibal listens, some part of him still detached, to the way the pain shapes the sound of the words.

"Then _lie to me!_"

"Sweet Will. I knew you long before we met. All I've ever wanted is for you to see the truth."

Will screams again, dropping to his knees and bringing the butt of the pistol down hard on Hannibal's skull.

Bright white overtakes his sight for just a moment, and Hannibal feels the wash of hot blood from the rift in his skin. But he still holds the chef's knife, and as the figure of the man kneeling beside him resolves through the haze, he rolls and sinks it into Will's side, just below the kidney.

Even still, after all of this, the simple betrayal on his face...

"Remarkable boy," Hannibal says, and twists the knife. "I think I'll eat your heart."

Will topples backward, but does not quite lose balance. The knife catches, then slides from the wound, bringing with it a torrent of blood. He sways, but as Hannibal begins to move, Will lurches to the side and smashes his fist into Hannibal's destroyed kneecap.

It is the first time in a very long while he has cried out in pain.

He clutches for the knife, finds nothing.

Will, his lips bloody, slumps over him and slides the blade between Hannibal's ribs, putting his weight on it until the tip snaps off against the tiles below.

Hannibal has tasted hot, living blood, but never so much of his own. Now it spills from between his lips without his consent, the taste both heavy and sweet.

Will Graham stares at him, both hands still clutching the knife handle, a lifeline.

"Look," Hannibal says, though the blood dampens his voice. "Look at yourself."

He is yet cogent enough to see Will's understanding. And he mourns, a little, for he knows that, as did Actaeon, both he and Will have looked too long. Then, he closes his eyes, and of anything after, he knows nothing at all.


End file.
